Yet it would convey a wrong impression of the Tokugawa period to suggest that bureaucratic tightness of regime was its sole or most vital characteristic. The age was marked as strongly by its expansive powers as by the restraints that attempted to direct them. For in this epoch, the common people, set apart in a class distinct from the warriors and aristocracy, rose to a vigour and cultivation that was almost a new thing in Japanese history. "It was," writes Fenollosa, "like the rise of the industrial classes in the free cities of Europe in those middle centuries when the old feudal system was breaking up. There, too, could be seen armoured lords of castles flourishing side by side with burghers and guilders. It is the same duality which forms the keynote of Tokugawa culture taken as a whole.... The keynote of Tokugawa life and art is their broad division into two main streams--the aristocratic and the plebeian. These two flowed on side by side with comparatively little intermingling. On the one side select companies of gentlemen and ladies congregated in gorgeous castles and yashikis, daimyos and samurai, exercising, studying their own and China's past, weaving martial codes of honour, surrounding themselves with wonderful utensils of lacquer, porcelain, embroidery, and cunningly wrought bronze; and on the other side great cities like Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Yedo, swarming with manufacturers, artizans, and merchants, sharing little in the castle privileges, but devising for themselves methods of self-expression in local government, schools, science, literature, and art." Examining into the history of Japanese colour-prints, one must leave entirely aside the interesting and sometimes sublime art of the cultivated and aristocratic classes and their tradition-hallowed schools of painting. The prints were solely the product of the popular school; they were in a way allied to those delicate Japanese handicrafts, such as bronze and lacquer, which are characteristically the output of the common people.